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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

AMD's Future of Fusion

At a later session at AMD's Analyst Day, the company discussed the future of its processors, particularly focusing on the future of the "Fusion" APU chips at the heart of the company's strategy.

Chekib Akrout, Senior Vice President of the Technology Group, started by discussion the basic core architectures. He described how Bulldozer, the new high-end core, is designed with building blocks that use two integer units along with one floating-point unit. He said this lets Bulldozer have two very strong threads on completely independent integer units, which he said was much more powerful than a hyperthreaded, single-core solution. (As usual, we won't really know performance until real systems ship.)

Akrout talked about the Bulldozer core architecture, which he said will be the heart of AMD's APUs going forward. It will initially ship in an 8-core version aimed at desktops (as Zambezi) and servers (in a single die version called Valencia and a dual-die version called Interlagos).

He talked about how there would be an enhanced version in 2012, followed by a completely new generation in 2013.

He also discussed the Bobcat core, aimed at lower-power system, which he said would deliver 90 percent of the processing power of conventional processors while using a lot less power. This is a 40nm design. The first products here will be Zacate and Ontario, part of the Brazos platform.

He said the company was able to move from the first tape out to first production chips in 285 days, much faster than most chips. Again, he said Bobcat would move from 40nm to 28nm, with an enhanced version in 2012 and a next generation in 2013.

Chuck Moore , corporate fellow described the architecture behind the APUs. He said today's integrated graphics-based platforms are slowed down because of they typically have two bottlenecks. They typically have two chips - one for CPU and one for GPU connected by a bus that tops out at about 7 GB/Sec; and also have a connection to memory limited to about 17 GB/Sec. In AMD's new APU, he said, they are now one chip, which removes the first bottle neck, and the connection to memory will be at about 27 GB/Sec.

Moore said this can make it three times more powerful, but can also reduce the power consumption of the chip, allowing much longer battery life; and reduces the physical area of the chip, allowing smaller designs. He also talked about how improvements in memory were also helping systems with discrete graphics.

In addition to graphics, he said this was important because it enables an 'accelerated data parallel processing capability," allowing new kinds of applications. He talked about the need for a heterogeneous computing software ecosystem to allow these new applications. Moore noted that it has been hard for many applications to make use of the GPU, but said the new emerging stack would make this easier.

In years to come, he said, there would be significant and ongoing improvements in memory in the system such as PCIe Gen 3, with a 2X increase in speed, and improvements in the connections to DRAM and (in discrete systems) graphics memory.

He also talked about a single unified virtual address space (for both the CPU and the GPU), virtual memory support, and participation in system-level coherency - whether the GPU is part of an APU or a discrete unit. He also said that the hardware was optimized (with application power management) to speed up the CPU when the GPU wasn't needed as much; or vice versa, to better manage the power in the system.

Over time, he said he hopes for more OS-level support, including things like GPU computer context switching, Other things he would like to see include coherent PCI Express for discrete GPUs. And eventually there will be a task parallel queuing runtime, allowing programmers not to have to worry about such things much.

Summarizing - and contrasting AMD's strategy with Intel's, Moore talked about AMD's experience with graphics through the old ATI group, including lots of support for Direct X11, while its competitor (which he didn't name ) doesn't have experience in high-end graphics and is only shipping a DirectX 10 product. And he talked about how AMD will have multiple APU solutions (with the Ontario and Brazos products) while its competitor will only have one.

Akrout then discussed the company's processing technology roadmap, using both Globalfoundries and TSMC for manufacturing. He talked about Ontario and Zacate were produced on TSMC's 40nm process; while Llano and the first Bulldozer products would be made on Globalfoundries 32nm "gate-first high-k/metal gate" process. While that has been ramping slower than the company had originally hoped, he said the technology is ramping quickly and he was certain products would be available next year.

He said AMD would be moving to the "half-node" cadence of 28nm next, and then followed by 20nm (for 2013 products) and 14nm (for 2015 products). Note this is a change from AMD's traditional CPU focus, which would normally follow a 32nm with a full-node jump to 22nm.

Memory bandwidth, storage density, and interconnects (including optical interconnects) will also see a great deal of evolution over the next couple of years, Akrout said.

In a financial section, Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert raised the company's predicted gross margin for next year to 44 to 48 percent, saying the firm's long term goal is to make that above 50 percent.

Later on AMD CEO Dirk Meyer was a bit more specific about when products would ship. He said the Brazos platform is shipping to AMD's customers now, with systems expected at CES in January. Llano is now slated for "volume production for revenue" in Q2 with the first Bulldozer chips (desktop and server) slated for production shipment in the summertime . (This probably means we'll see real systems with Llano in the second half of next year, and with Bulldozer towards the end of 2011.)

He also said Trinity, the second generation APU based on the Bulldozer core would start to ship samples in the summer; with initial production at 28nm starting before the end of next year.

In a Q&A session, General Manager Rick Bergman said he didn't expect the GPU attach rate in new machines to change in 2011 as a result of new chips that integrate CPU and GPU features. He said AMD's solution allows discrete chips to be added easily; and that Intel's solution is too old.

Akrout said 28nm was really a simple shrink from 32nm, continuing to use the gate-first process, and said he was confident it would appear next year.

Seifert confirmed that Globalfoundries remained the company's preferred partner, and said it had incentives to move production then, but said there would other factors including capacity availability and technology. He said he expected more of the company's production to move to 32nm in the year to come.

Meyer said it was "unsatisfactory" that the company's notebook share was less than its desktop share, and said the company hopes to gain share with the new products. He said the change to APUs is a bigger change - and thus a bigger opportunity - than the company saw with the change to 64-bit server chips a few years back.

Meyer said last year's antitrust settlement with Intel "opened the door" to the potential to fairer competition, and said that while he expected Intel to abide by the settlements, culture changes slowly. But he said AMD has seen some customers more open to it this year, following the settlements.

Meyer said its plan of record as of a year ago was to ship Llano for revenue by the end of this year, with customer shipments in early 2011; and noted that plan changed about six months ago. He said the company was sampling Llano to its customers now, and would sample much more in the coming months. Akrout said the company was very optimistic about the ramping of the 32nm products now.

Bergman said over time he expected the top 5 percent of the market to remain high-end CPUs (such as the Zambezi chip) with discrete GPUs , but said he thought the bulk of the market would be for APUs.

None of the executives said would give specific performance numbers, but Bergman said the market didn't care about GHz, but rather about the actual experience using the products, and said the company was helping to create new benchmarks. He said he was confident in the performance of the products as said any shortfall of Llano vs. Intel's products would be matched by the upcoming Bulldozer products.

Although he wouldn't get specific, Bergman indicated with APUs, AMD planned to charge as much as it used to for individual CPU and GPU parts, but said system vendors would save money on building the systems, as they required less performance.

Bergman also mentioned a "Fusion fund" where it is working with software vendors to encourage them to support the new capabilities of the APU.

On tablets, Meyer said they might impact some sales of notebooks (just as netbooks may have), but that overall they would be an addition to the market.Meyer said we would see AMD-based tablets "sooner rather than later," and Moore said the 10-hour battery life on Brazos was based on current benchmarks, which he said weren't really reflective of the real world, but that the company was continuing to work on improving this.

Seifert said AMD was not required to invest additional capital in Globalfoundries; but talked about how the companies had a wafer supply agreement and a mutual need to work together on technology.

Meyer said his biggest disappointment of the year relative to expectations was in the server market, as OEM systems with "MagnyCours" only came to market in Q3 of this year.

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